I found the frisbee out in the yard where the kids had been playing with it. It’s back indoors now, where it can’t get lost or chewed up by a dog or lawnmower.

The Open Door Mission in Rochester sent it years ago as a thank you gift for a donation I had made at Christmas. It’s quite sturdy for a promotional item–white with blue graphics, including the words “restoring hope.”

It was brand new and clean when my nephew Michael first started visiting me, his Tia. Since I didn’t have any kiddy-character dinnerware around, this frisbee became the perfect dish. It was smooth plastic with a rim deep enough to keep food from escaping.

In those days I improvised everything. I sat Michael on the floor on a Mexican blanket and covered a small footstool with a towel as a tablecloth. I have pictures of him, big smile on his face, as he sat there and ate from his frisbee dish.

When he finished eating, and it was play time, I washed the frisbee and put some small toys and books in it. Many of his “toys” were improvs also. An empty Quaker Oats canister became a hat, a telescope, or a horn. Plastic measuring cups could be stacked like blocks, or nested by size. Even my bookmarks had pictures of animals and flowers on them, and we worked on words and colors as we sorted through them.

But there was always the frisbee. Early games of peek-a-boo, as Michael hid behind it and giggled when he peeked out at me. The frisbee as a hat, balancing on his dark hair until he slowly tipped his head and let it fall in his lap. Then he learned to roll it to me. I rolled it back across my not quite level farmhouse floor so he could learn to catch it too.

In the summer, we used the frisbee as a scoop when we played in the green turtle sandbox under the silver maple tree, along with empty yogurt containers and plastic spoons (more improv toys). We discovered it would float in the swimming pool, circling around with the flow of water from the filter. With Michael in my arms, I would swim with it, or toward it.We made a whirlpool and tried to catch the frisbee as it whooshed past.

As he grew and learned to swim, he threw the frisbee and paddled on his own, trying to catch up with it to throw it again. He still plays that game in my pool, either on his own or with his sister, Maria, his cousins, or his Tia.

And Michael plays frisbee. As in, throwing it and catching it. Today, the white Open Door Mission frisbee gets used like a frisbee. Not a plastic dish, or a peek-a-boo toy.

Michael plays golf now, “like Tiger,” he says. And he plays T-ball in his back yard, and kicks the soccer ball here in my driveway. He goes to school on the bus, carries his backpack, and calls me on the phone to tell me what’s new. “Maria threw up today,” he reported recently. “She ate fruit, then she threw up. But she’s okay now.”

I don’t know if he remembers eating off the frisbee when he first came to Tia’s house. He had arrived from Guatemala just a short while before, at the age of ten months. I mentioned it to him once, when we were playing frisbee outside, how he had used it as a dish when he was little. He laughed, and said, “that’s a funny thing, Tia.”

The frisbee is in the house with me now. I’m not usually sentimental about anything other than photographs. After all, it’s just a plastic disk, grass-stained and scraped a little after all these years. The blue lettering has faded a bit, but I can still read the words. “Restoring Hope”.